* * *
The Indians had left us a portion of the bear meat, tidily wrapped in oiled skin and hung from the branches of a nearby tree to discourage the attentions of skunks and raccoons. After breakfast and a hasty bath in the creek, Jamie took his bearings by sun and mountain.
“That way,” he said, nodding toward a distant blue peak. “See where it makes a notch wi’ the shorter one? On the other side, it’s the Indians’ land; the new Treaty Line follows that ridge.”
“Someone actually surveyed through there?” I peered unbelievingly at the vista of saw-toothed mountain ranges rising from valleys filled with morning mist. The mountains rose ahead of us like an endless series of floating mirages, fading from black-green to blue to purple, the farthest peaks etched black and needle-sharp against a crystal sky.
“Oh, aye.” He swung up into his saddle, turning his horse’s head so the sun fell over his shoulder. “They had to, to say for sure which land could be taken for settling. I made sure of the boundary before we left Wilmington, and Myers said the same—this side of the highest ridge. I did think to ask the fellows who dined with us last night, though, only to be sure they thought so, too.” He grinned down at me. “Ready, Sassenach?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I assured him, and turned my horse to follow.
He had rinsed out his shirt—or what was left of it—in the stream. The stained rag of linen was spread out to dry behind his saddle, leaving him half-naked in leather riding breeks, his plaid wrapped carelessly round his waist. The long scratches left by the bear’s attack were black across his fair skin, but there was no visible inflammation, and from the ease with which he moved in the saddle, the wounds seemed not to trouble him.
Neither did anything else, so far as I could see. The tinge of wariness he always bore was still with him; it had been part of him since boyhood—but some weight had lifted in the night. I thought perhaps it was our meeting with the three hunters; this first encounter with savages had been vastly reassuring to us both, and seemed substantially to have eased Jamie’s visions of tomahawk-wielding cannibals behind every tree.
Or it might be the trees themselves—or the mountains. His spirits had grown lighter with every foot upward from the coastal plain. I couldn’t help sharing his apparent joy—but at the same time, felt a growing dread of what that joy might lead to.
By midmorning the slopes had grown too thickly forested to ride any farther. Looking up a nearly vertical rock face into a dizzying tangle of dark branches, sparked with gold and green and brown, I was inclined to think the horses were lucky to be stopping at the bottom. We hobbled them near a stream, thick with grass along its edge, and plunged in on foot, onward and upward, ever deeper into the bloody Forest Primeval.
Towering pines and hemlocks, was it? I thought, clambering over the burled knots of a fallen tree. The monstrous trunks rose so high that the lowest limbs started twenty feet above my head. Longfellow had no idea.
The air was damp, cool but fecund, and my moccasins sank soundlessly into centuries-thick black leaf mold. My own footprint in the soft mud of a stream bank seemed strange and sudden as a dinosaur’s track.
We reached the top of a ridge, only to find another before us, and another beyond. I did not know what we might be looking for, or how we would know if we found it. Jamie covered miles with his tireless hill-walker’s stride, taking in everything. I tagged behind, enjoying the scenery, pausing now and then to gather some fascinating plant or root, stowing my treasures in the bag at my belt.
We made our way along the back of one ridge, only to find our way blocked by a great heath bald: a patch of mountain laurel that looked from a distance like a shiny bare patch among the dark conifers, but closer to, proved to be an impenetrable thicket, its springy branches interwoven like a basket.
We backtracked, and turned downward, out from under the huge fragrant firs, across slopes of wild timothy and muhly grass that had gone bright yellow in the sun, and at last back into the soothing green of oak and hickory, on a wooded bluff that overlooked a small and nameless river.
It was cool under the trees’ sudden shade, and I sighed in relief, lifting the hair off my neck to admit a breath of air. Jamie heard me and turned, smiling, holding back a limber branch so that I could follow him.
We didn’t talk much; aside from the breath required for climbing, the mountain itself seemed to inhibit speech; full of secret green places, it was a vivid offspring of the ancient Scottish mountains, thick with forest, and twice the height of those barren black parental crags. Still, its air held the same injunction to silence, the same promise of enchantment.
The ground here was covered in a foot-deep layer of fallen leaves, soft and spongy underfoot, and the spaces between the trees seemed illusionary, as though to pass between those huge, lichened trunks might transport one suddenly to another dimension of reality.
Jamie’s hair sparked in the occasional shafts of sunlight, a torch to follow through the shadows of the wood. It had darkened somewhat over the years, to a deep, rich auburn, but the long days of riding and walking in the sun had bleached his crown to copper fire. He had lost the thong that bound his hair; he paused, and brushed the thick damp locks back from his face, so that I saw the startling streak of white just above one temple. Normally hidden among the darker red, it showed rarely—a legacy of the bullet wound received in the cave of Abandawe.
Despite the warmth of the day, I shivered slightly in recollection. I would greatly have preferred to forget Haiti and its savage mysteries altogether, but there was little hope of that. Sometimes, on the verge of sleep, I would hear the voice of the cave-wind, and the nagging echo of the thought that came in its wake: Where else?
We climbed a granite ledge, thick with moss and lichen, wet with the omnipresent flow of water, then followed the path of a descending freshet, brushing aside long grass that pulled at our legs, dodging the drooping branches of mountain laurel and the thick-leaved rhododendrons.
Wonders sprang up by my feet, small orchids and brilliant fungi, trembling and shiny as jellies, shimmering red and black on fallen tree trunks. Dragonflies hung over the water, jewels immobile in the air, vanishing in mist.
I felt dazed with abundance, ravished by beauty. Jamie’s face bore the dream-stunned look of a man who knows himself sleeping, but does not wish to wake. Paradoxically, the better I felt, the worse I felt, too; desperately happy—and desperately afraid. This was his place, and surely he felt it as well as I.
In early afternoon we stopped to rest and drink from a small spring at the edge of a natural clearing. The ground beneath the maple trees was covered with a thick carpet of dark green leaves, among which I caught a sudden telltale flash of red.
“Wild strawberries!” I said with delight.
The berries were dark red and tiny, about the size of my thumb joint. By the standards of modern horticulture, they would have been too tart, nearly bitter, but eaten with a meal consisting of half-cooked cold bear meat and rock-hard corn dodgers, they were delicious—fresh explosions of flavor in my mouth; pinpricks of sweetness on my tongue.
I gathered handfuls in my cloak, not caring for stains—what was a little strawberry juice among the stains of pine pitch, soot, leaf smudges and simple dirt? By the time I had finished, my fingers were sticky and pungent with juice, my stomach was comfortably full, and the inside of my mouth felt as though it had been sandpapered, from the tartly acid taste of the berries. Still, I couldn’t resist reaching for just one more.
Jamie leaned his back against a sycamore, eyelids half lowered against the dazzle of afternoon sun. The little clearing held light like a cup, still and limpid.
“What d’ye think of this place, Sassenach?” he asked.
“I think it’s beautiful. Don’t you?”
He nodded, looking down between the trees, where a gentle slope full of wild hay and timothy fell away and rose again in a line of willows that fringed the distant river.
“I am thinking,” Jamie said, a little awkwardly. “There is the spring here in the wood. That meadow below—” He waved a hand toward the scrim of alders that screened the ridge from the grassy slope. “It would do for a few beasts at first, and then the land nearer the river might be cleared and put in crops. The rise of the land here is good for drainage. And here, see…” Caught by visions, he rose to his feet, pointing.
I looked carefully; to me, the place seemed little different from any of the steep wooded slopes and grassy coves through which we had wandered for the last couple of days. But to Jamie, with his farmer’s eye, houses and stock pens and fields sprang up like fairy mushrooms in the shadows of the trees.
Happiness was sticking out all over him, like porcupine quills. My heart felt like lead in my chest.
“You’re thinking we might settle here, then? Take the Governor’s offer?”
He looked at me, stopping abruptly in his speculations.
“We might,” he said. “If—”
He broke off and looked sideways at me. Sun-reddened as he was, I couldn’t tell whether he was flushed with sun or shyness.
“D’ye believe in signs at all, Sassenach?”
“What sorts of signs?” I asked guardedly.
In answer, he bent, plucked a sprig from the ground, and dropped it into my hand—the dark green leaves like small round Chinese fans, a pure white flower on a slender stem, and on another a half-ripe berry, its shoulders pale with shade, blushing crimson at the tip.
“This. It’s ours, d’ye see?” he said.
“Ours?”
“The Frasers’, I mean,” he explained. One large, blunt finger gently prodded the berry. “Strawberries ha’ always been the emblem of the clan—it’s what the name meant, to start with, when a Monsieur Fréselière came across from France wi’ King William that was—and took hold of land in the Scottish mountains for his trouble.”
King William that was. William the Conqueror, that was. Perhaps not the oldest of the Highland clans, the Frasers had still a distinguished heritage.
“Warriors from the start, were you?”
“And farmers, too.” The doubt in his eyes was fading into a smile.
I didn’t say what I was thinking, but I knew well enough that the thought must lie in his mind as well. There was no more of clan Fraser save scattered fragments, those who had survived by flight, by stratagem or luck. The clans had been smashed at Culloden, their chieftains slaughtered in battle or murdered by law.
Yet here he stood, tall and straight in his plaid, the dark steel of a Highland dirk by his side. Warrior and farmer both. And if the soil beneath his feet was not that of Scotland, it was free air that he breathed—and a mountain wind that stirred his hair, lifting copper strands to the summer sun.
I smiled up at him, fighting back my growing dismay.
“Fréselière, eh? Mr. Strawberry? He grew them, did he, or was he only fond of eating them?”
“Either or both,” he said dryly, “or it was maybe only that he was redheided, aye?”
I laughed, and he hunkered down beside me, unpinning his plaid.
“It’s a rare plant,” he said, touching the sprig in my open hand. “Flowers, fruit and leaves all together at the one time. The white flowers are for honor, and red fruit for courage—and the green leaves are for constancy.”
My throat felt tight as I looked at him.
“They got that one right,” I said.
He caught my hand in his own, squeezing my fingers around the tiny stem.
“And the fruit is the shape of a heart,” he said softly, and bent to kiss me.
The tears were near the surface; at least I had a good excuse for the one that oozed free. He dabbed it away, then stood up and pulled his belt loose, letting the plaid fall in folds around his feet. Then he stripped off shirt and breeks and smiled down at me, naked.
“There’s no one here,” he said. “No one but us.”
I would have said this seemed no reason, but I felt what it was he meant. We had been for days surrounded by vastness and threat, the wilderness no farther away than the pale circle of our fire. Yet here, we were alone together, part and parcel of the place, with no need in broad daylight to hold the wilderness at bay.
“In the old days, men would do this, to give fertility to the fields,” he said, giving me a hand to rise.
“I don’t see any fields.” And wasn’t sure whether to hope I never would. Nonetheless, I skimmed off my buckskin shirt, and pulled loose the knot of my makeshift brassiere. He eyed me with appreciation.
“Well, no doubt I shall have to cut down a few trees first, but that can wait, aye?”
We made a bed of plaid and cloaks, and lay down upon it naked, skin to skin among the yellow grasses and the scent of balsam and wild strawberries.
We touched each other for what might have been a very long time or no time at all, together in the garden of earthly delight. I forced away the thoughts that had plagued me up the mountain, determined only to share his joy for as long as it lasted. I grasped him tight and he breathed in deep and pressed himself hard into my hand.
“And what would Eden be without a serpent?” I murmured, fingers stroking.
His eyes creased into blue triangles, so close I could see the black of his pupils.
“And will ye eat wi’ me, then, mo chridhe? Of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil?”
I put out the tip of my tongue and drew it along his lower lip in answer. He shivered under my fingers, though the air was warm and sweet.
“Je suis prest,” I said. “Monsieur Fréselière.”
His head bent and his mouth fastened on my nipple, swollen as one of the tiny ripe berries.
“Madame Fréselière,” he whispered back. “Je suis à votre service.”
And then we shared the fruit and flowers, and the green leaves covering all.
* * *
We lay tangled in drowsiness, stirring only to bat away inquisitive insects, until the first shadows touched our feet. Jamie rose quietly, and covered me with a cloak, thinking me asleep. I heard the stealthy rustle as he dressed himself, and then the soft swish of his passage through the grass.
I rolled over, and saw him a little distance away, standing at the edge of the wood, looking out over the fall of land toward the river.
He wore nothing but his plaid, crumpled and blood-stained, belted round his waist. With his hair unbound and tangled round his shoulders, he looked the wild Highlander he was. What I had thought a trap for him—his family, his clan—was his strength. And what I had thought my strength—my solitude, my lack of ties—was my weakness.
Having known closeness, both its good and its bad, he had the strength to leave it, to step away from all notions of safety and venture out alone. And I—so proud of self-sufficiency at one time—could not bear the thought of loneliness again.
I had resolved to say nothing, to live in the moment, to accept whatever came. But the moment was here, and I could not accept it. I saw his head lift in decision, and at the same moment, saw his name carved in cold stone. Terror and despair washed over me.
As though he had heard the echo of my unspoken cry, he turned his head toward me. Whatever he saw in my face brought him swiftly to my side.
“What is it, Sassenach?”
There was no point in lying; not when he could see me.
“I’m afraid,” I blurted out.
He glanced quickly round for danger, one hand reaching for his knife, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Not that. Jamie—hold me. Please.”
He gathered me close against him, wrapping the cloak around me. I was shivering, though the air was still warm.
“It’s all right, a nighean donn,” he murmured. “I’m here. What’s frightened ye, then?”
“You,” I said, and clung tight. His heart thumped just under my ear, strong and steady. “Here. It makes me afraid to think of you here, of us coming here—”
“Afraid?” he asked. “Of what, Sassenach?” His arms tightened around me. “I did say when we were wed that I would always see ye fed, no?” He pulled me closer, tucking my head into the curve of his shoulder.
“I gave ye three things that day,” he said softly. “My name, my family, and the protection of my body. You’ll have those things always, Sassenach— so long as we both shall live. No matter where we may be. I willna let ye go hungry or cold; I’ll let nothing harm ye, ever.”
“I’m not afraid of any of that,” I blurted. “I’m afraid you’ll die, and I can’t stand it if you do, Jamie, I really can’t!”
He jerked back a little, surprised, and looked down into my face.
“Well, I’ll do my best to oblige ye, Sassenach,” he said, “but ye ken I may not have all the say in the matter.” His face was serious, but one corner of his mouth curled up irrepressibly.
The sight did me in utterly.
“Don’t you laugh!” I said furiously. “Don’t you dare laugh!”
“Oh, I’m not,” he assured me, trying to straighten his face.
“You are!” I punched him in the chest. Now he was laughing. I punched him again, harder, and before I knew it, was hammering him in earnest, my fists making small dull thumps against his plaid. He grabbed for my hand, but I ducked my head and bit him on the thumb. He let out a cry and jerked his hand away.
He examined the toothmarks for a moment, then looked at me, one eyebrow raised. The humor lingered in his eyes, but at least he’d stopped laughing, the bastard.
“Sassenach, ye’ve seen me damn near dead a dozen times, and not turned a hair. Whyever are ye takin’ on so now, and me not even ill?”
“Never turned a hair?” I gawked at him in furious amazement. “You think I wasn’t upset?”
He rubbed a knuckle across his upper lip, eyeing me in some amusement.
“Oh. Well, I did think ye cared, of course. But I never thought of it in just that way, I admit.”
“Of course you didn’t! And if you had, it wouldn’t make any difference. You—you—Scot!” It was the worst thing I could think of to call him. Finding no more words, I turned and stomped away.
Unfortunately, stomping has relatively little effect when executed in bare feet on a grassy meadow. I stepped on something sharp, uttered a small cry, and limped a few more steps before having to stop.
I had stepped on some sort of cocklebur; half a dozen vicious caltrops were stuck in my bare sole, blood drops welling from the tiny punctures. Precariously balanced on one foot, I tried to pick them out, cursing under my breath.
I wobbled and nearly fell. A strong hand caught me under the elbow and steadied me. I set my teeth and finished jerking out the spiny burs. I pulled my elbow out of his grasp and turning on my heel, walked—with a good deal more care—back to where I had left my clothing.
Dropping the cloak on the ground, I proceeded to dress, with what dignity was possible. Jamie stood, arms folded, watching me without comment.
“When God threw Adam out of Paradise, at least Eve went with him,” I said, talking to my fingers as I fastened the drawstring of my trousers.
“Aye, that’s true,” he agreed, after a cautious pause. He gave me a sidelong glance, to see whether I was about to hit him again.
“Ah—ye havena been eating any o’ the plants ye picked this morning, have ye, Sassenach? No, I didna think so,” he added hastily, seeing my expression. “I only wondered. Myers says some things here give ye the nightmare something fierce.”
“I am not having nightmares,” I said, with more force than strictly necessary had I been telling the truth. I was having waking nightmares, though ingestion of hallucinogenic plant substances had nothing to do with it.
He sighed.
“D’ye mean to tell me straight out what ye’re talkin’ about, Sassenach, or do ye mean me to suffer a bit first?”
I glared at him, caught as usual between the urge to laugh and the urge to hit him with a blunt object. Then a wave of despair overcame both laughter and anger. My shoulders slumped in surrender.
“I’m talking about you,” I said.
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re a bloody Highlander, and you’re all about honor and courage and constancy, and I know you can’t help it, and I wouldn’t want you to, only—only damn it, it’s going to take you to Scotland and get you killed, and there’s nothing I can do about it!”
He gave me a look of incredulity.
“Scotland?” he said, as though I’d said something completely mad.
“Scotland! Where your bloody grave is!”
He rubbed a hand slowly through his hair, looking down the bridge of his nose at me.
“Oh,” he said at last. “I see, then. Ye think if I go to Scotland, I must die there, since that’s where I’ll be buried. Is that it?”
I nodded, too upset to speak.
“Mmphm. And just why is it ye think I’m going to Scotland?” he asked carefully.
I glared at him in exasperation, and waved an arm at the expanse of wilderness around us.
“Where the hell else are you going to get settlers for this land? Of course you’re going to Scotland!”
He looked at me, exasperated in turn.
“How in the name of God d’ye think I should do that, Sassenach? I might have, when I had the gems, but now? I’ve maybe ten pound to my name, and that’s borrowed. Shall I fly to Scotland like a bird, then? And lead folk back behind me, walkin’ on the water?”
“You’ll think of something,” I said miserably. “You always do.”
He gave me a queer look, then looked away and paused for several moments before answering.
“I hadna realized ye thought I was God Almighty, Sassenach,” he said at last.
“I don’t,” I said. “Moses, maybe.” The words were facetious, but neither one of us was joking.
He walked away a bit, hands clasped behind his back.
“Watch out for the burs,” I called after him, seeing him heading for the location of my recent mishap. He altered his path in response, but said nothing. He walked to and fro across the clearing, head bent in thought. At last he came back, to stand in front of me.
“I canna do it alone,” he said quietly. “You’re right about that. But I dinna think I need go to Scotland for my settlers.”
“What else?”
“My men—the men who were wi’ me in Ardsmuir,” he said. “They’re here already.”
“But you haven’t any idea where they are,” I protested. “And besides, they were transported years ago! They’ll be settled; they won’t want to pull up stakes and come to the ends of the bloody earth with you!”
He smiled, a little wryly.
“You did, Sassenach.”
I took a deep breath. The nagging weight of fear that had burdened my heart for the last weeks had eased. With that concern lifted, though, there was now room in my mind to contemplate the staggering difficulty of the task he was setting himself. Track down men scattered over three colonies, persuade them to come with him, and simultaneously find sufficient capital to finance the clearing of land and planting of crops. To say nothing of the sheer enormity of labor involved in carving some small foothold out of this virgin wilderness.
“I’ll think of something,” he said, smiling slightly as he watched doubts and uncertainties flit across my face. “I always do, aye?”
All of my breath went out in a long sigh.
“You do,” I said. “Jamie—are you sure? Your aunt Jocasta—”
He dismissed that possibility with a flick of his hand.
“No,” he said. “Never.”
I still hesitated, feeling guilty.
“You wouldn’t—it’s not just because of me? What I said about keeping slaves?”
“No,” he said. He paused, and I saw the two twisted fingers of his right hand twitch. He saw it, too, and stopped the movement abruptly.
“I have lived as a slave, Claire,” he said quietly, head bent. “And I couldna live, knowing there was a man on earth who felt toward me as I have felt toward those who thought they owned me.”
I reached out and covered his crippled hand with my own. Tears ran down my cheeks, warm and soothing as summer rain.
“You won’t leave me?” I asked at last. “You won’t die?”
He shook his head, and squeezed my hand tight.
“You are my courage, as I am your conscience,” he whispered. “You are my heart—and I your compassion. We are neither of us whole, alone. Do ye not know that, Sassenach?”
“I do know that,” I said, and my voice shook. “That’s why I’m so afraid. I don’t want to be half a person again, I can’t bear it.”
He thumbed a lock of hair off my wet cheek, and pulled me into his arms, so close that I could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. He was so solid, so alive, ruddy hair curling gold against bare skin. And yet I had held him so before—and lost him.
His hand touched my cheek, warm despite the dampness of my skin.
“But do ye not see how verra small a thing is the notion of death, between us two, Claire?” he whispered.
My hands curled into fists against his chest. No, I didn’t think it a small thing at all.
“All the time after ye left me, after Culloden—I was dead then, was I not?”
“I thought you were. That’s why I—oh.” I took a deep, tremulous breath, and he nodded.
“Two hundred years from now, I shall most certainly be dead, Sassenach,” he said. He smiled crookedly. “Be it Indians, wild beasts, a plague, the hangman’s rope, or only the blessing of auld age—I will be dead.”
“Yes.”
“And while ye were there—in your own time—I was dead, no?”
I nodded, wordless. Even now, I could look back and see the abyss of despair into which that parting had dropped me, and from which I had climbed, one painful inch at a time.
Now I stood with him again upon the summit of life, and could not contemplate descent. He reached down and plucked a stalk of grass, spreading the soft green beards between his fingers.
“ ‘Man is like the grass of the field,’ ” he quoted softly, brushing the slender stem over my knuckles, where they rested against his chest. “ ‘Today it blooms; tomorrow it withers and is cast into the oven.’ ”
He lifted the silky green tuft to his lips and kissed it, then touched it gently to my mouth.
“I was dead, my Sassenach—and yet all that time, I loved you.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the tickle of the grass on my lips, light as the touch of sun and air.
“I loved you, too,” I whispered. “I always will.”
The grass fell away. Eyes still closed, I felt him lean toward me, and his mouth on mine, warm as sun, light as air.
“So long as my body lives, and yours—we are one flesh,” he whispered. His fingers touched me, hair and chin and neck and breast, and I breathed his breath and felt him solid under my hand. Then I lay with my head on his shoulder, the strength of him supporting me, the words deep and soft in his chest.
“And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours. Claire—I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you.”
The wind stirred the leaves of the chestnut trees nearby, and the scents of late summer rose up rich around us; pine and grass and strawberries, sunwarmed stone and cool water, and the sharp, musky smell of his body next to mine.
“Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed.”
“That’s the first law of thermodynamics,” I said, wiping my nose.
“No,” he said. “That’s faith.”